Photoshop CC update adds AI-powered subject selection tool and more

The AI-powered Select Subject feature that Adobe demoed back in November has finally arrived in Photoshop CC! The feature was officially released just minutes ago in Photoshop CC version 19.1, which also includes the addition of a Decontamination slider to the Select and Mask workspace and some significant compatibility updates for Windows users.

The major update is, obviously, the arrival of Select Subject to Photoshop CC. When it was first demoed in November, the Photoshop team touted the tool—which is powered by Adobe Sensei AI technology—as a way to "select prominent subjects in an image with one click." That's what they hope to deliver today.

A single click of the Select Subject button in the Quick Select tool should easily isolate your subject in images like the one below:

Of course, more difficult scenarios where the subject isn't so obviously delineated against the background will give Select Subject more trouble—the original demo video, embedded below, showed that—but it promises to "let you get started with your selections faster than ever before."

In addition to Select Subject, Adobe also added a Decontamination slider to the Select and Mask workspace that allows you to select the amount of color decontamination applied to an image:

For Windows users, version 19.1 brings much-requested support for Windows High Density Monitors—allowing you to switch between displays of varying resolutions and sizes seamlessly. Jerry Harris, principal scientist on the Photoshop team and himself a Windows user, explains what this means in the Adobe blog post:

With this release, Photoshop on Windows 10 Creator’s Edition now offers a full range of choices for UI scale factors from 100% through 400%, in 25% increments. This means that the Photoshop user interface will look crisp, beautiful, and the right size no matter the density of your monitor. Photoshop will now automatically adjust itself based on your Windows settings, making it simple to set up.

[...]

In addition, we worked very closely with Microsoft to provide per-monitor scaling across monitors with different scale factors. This means that a high resolution (HiDPI) laptop now works seamlessly alongside a lower resolution desktop monitor (or vice versa). One monitor can have a scale factor of 175% and another a scale factor of 400%.

And finally, Windows users also get advanced support for the Windows dial, which can now adjust brush settings while you paint. Before this, you could only adjust settings between brush strokes, but you can now adjust brush size, opacity, and other settings as you draw:

As of publication, this update should be live and ready to download if you're already a Creative Cloud subscriber. If you want to learn more about any of the features above, or dive into bug fixes and other minutia, head over to the Adobe blog. Otherwise, just update your copy through the Creative Cloud app and you're ready to go.

Comments

As many people have already stated, we can also confirm that it does work, but only to a certain extent. It is definitely looking for the subject and not just lines and shapes, but it still misses areas depending on the complexity of your image. There are some examples in our recent blog post if anyone is interested.

They keep trying these daft things that'll only work if the subject is separate in colour and contrast from its background. And even then when it comes to a reverse curve, frequently found on the human form it fails, miserably. Once I'd got used to the Pen tool I can cut around a figure with outstretched arms and splayed fingers in about 15 minutes. Which becomes much faster than having to correct the mistakes made by these stupid tools and usually when I've spent a lot of time altering lighting and so on. Then I have to start again from scratch using as usuall the Pen tool, it never lets me down. Cheers

Updated not long after they published it. Not bad at all, but I really want to see how this is going to perform and what other AI will be coming after this version.If I understand right the way we are going CS going to learn the way we are editing/retouching the photos and gradually offers more and more custom help.My objection is: I don't want to get lazy with retouching and I would like to keep my own creativity, so we shall see what and how we are going to work together.By the end of the day it is us who decide how much photoshop we are using...

Just in case anyone is wondering....if you are still using Windows 7 the new upgrade to PS CC will not work and will possibly lead to difficulties the way some of your editing choices are displayed under the various headings. In my case all of the fonts were very small. After accessing various videos and going to the Adobe help groups the solution was still not obvious. I called Adobe support and the helpful person I reached tried everything to make the fonts larger...including of course going to preference>interface, etc. After placing me on hold she determined that the engineers at Adobe had NOT been able to get the new update to work as expected with Windows 7. Obviously I deleted the new version of PS and reinstalled the last 2018 version before the update....viola, everything worked as expected. However, know that your work-space will have to be reconfigured. One hopes that the Adobe engineers will solve the problem.

After playing around with it a bit my overall impression is that it does make the job of pulling a subject out of a background easier. No it's not perfect, especially in the "hairy cat' test, where you will still have to do some fine tuning, but think about it in terms of a tool that saves you a few steps in the selection process by getting you to that fine-tuning part quicker than doing it yourself.

This AI selection algorithm learned to identify the subject.That’s nice and once it achieves superhuman level in a couple years, will be a real game changer in video editing.

However, it does nothing to the challinging part of selection in still photography, identifying foreground pixels near the selection edges.

For this to improve, Adobe would have needed to train an AI to learn to separate foreground pixels from difficult backgrounds. This is harder because it requires hundreds of thousands perfectly selected foregrounds which there is no known dataset for.

The subject recognition in this CC update OTOH is a standard problem (object recognition) in the deep learning community with known solutions based on open datasets. Relatively easy to embedd into PS. Still useful of course.

I had to restart (you can also logout) before I could see the change but it is very helpful. My eyes were dying trying to look at those tiny icons and text. I have now set my laptop resolution back to 2560x1440 at last!

I am glad they are working on improving selection tools in PS. I have been using PS since v2 and selection is the single most useful tool for me. Despite all the praise of magical improvements, I still find myself cursing the imprecision.

This feature is probably less about changing the background around a subject than it is about removing, in combination with the content-aware fill tool, your ex-partner from all your travel snaps after the big backpacking adventure around Europe went completely pear-shaped in Barcelona, resulting in their running off with a random flamenco dancer, leaving you penniless, without passport, and forced to become an itinerant street photoshopper, helping other recently-solo travellers to erase their own bad memories, in exchange for a few Euro.

This peaked my interest, as I'm a pro still stuck to CS6, and do a ton of knocking out models shot in studio... CS6 quick select tools are extremely capable and quick, but the work in a mask is the complex hair knockouts... That's where there is substantial time involved. Nothing I'm seeing here makes it look like the "AI" can deliver that work in one click. LOVE to see someone show me different tho. Might make me go cloud after all.

The silver bullet for routine model masking in the studio is a technology like Hensel Freemask, using two shots with different strobe groups. The resulting masks are ages ahead of anything one could create in PS. And they are instant, you shoot model and mask simultaneously.

I gave it a quick try on a handful of images... It's hit & miss, certainly not perfect. It does illustrate that the software is indeed looking at more than just colours, lines, and patterns, and actually looking at subjects in the image. This is likely just the beginning of something that will be incredible and game changing as it evolves.

Apologies if this was addressed in the November demo, but does the new Select Subject feature rely on communicating with the Adobe mothership to achieve its "AI power?" Doesn't really bother me if it does, but I could see it being an issue if you were working in a law firm or some other environment where you're under strict confidentiality guidelines.

I'm not sure if the question was answered completely. As with the OP, I would also like to know if any information is exchanged between the client and offsite servers or computers that evaluate the image to complete the process. Many people do work that simply cannot be shared with uncontrolled parties.

"In addition, we worked very closely with Microsoft to provide per-monitor scaling across monitors with different scale factors. This means that a high resolution (HiDPI) laptop now works seamlessly alongside a lower resolution desktop monitor (or vice versa). One monitor can have a scale factor of 175% and another a scale factor of 400%."

This is the best news in a long time. It's been a struggle to have my 2k Eizo next to my 4k laptop where the tool panels reside. Just updated and the result is night and day.

Photoshop is an art, and you can do a lot with it. Change the atmosphere through different lighting and make the pictures look more interesting.But so much better to get the right exposure than to have to mess around later with Photoshop.

One could reply in the same vein that it´s easy to spot overly zealous Adobe apologists.

It all depends on what you mean by "can´t have". It´s not a money issue, though overall CC is considerably more expensive than the perpetual creative suites.

It´s being forced into perpetual payment once you jump on the CC train w/o any chance to ever "have" the tools you pay for.

Doesn´t bother you? Good for you. For me however I consider what I do important enough to not throw myself at the mercy of the maker of the tools I use.

And why be so vocal about it? Well, besides you very vocally adressing assumed adobe haters (which ones, actually?!) how about taking away choice, 80-90% of the worldwide image content creation depending on perpetually lining the pockets of one single software company, plus the stench of corporate fascism for starters?

Not sure what you’re talking about, since most negative comments I see on Adobe products come from actual users with legitimate frustrations. More frustrations than I would care to engage in. Who has time for that?

From what I read, most negative comments from Adobe users are from those users who do not subscribe. Clearly the issue is the subscription and since it is not going to change, why keep beating that horse? That is what I don't understand.

I understand people being angry over the subscription pricing, however, many were also just as angry over the upgrade pricing which occurred on a yearly basis. I like Adobe products. Have tried many others and always come back to Adobe.

For me, the $10 a month is a good deal, and even if they introduce one major new feature per year, for me (being a hobbyist photography) that's not too bad (unless it's a completely useless tool or add-in like something to automatically post to Snapchat or something) but so far I've seen decent improvements in PS over the year's that I've subscribed. I'd probably be more irritated if I paid $700 (what PS used to cost) and get marginal updates, on top of having to buy the upgrade every few years for $300 per upgrade, approximately. The subscription allows what was once a prohibitively expensive product (or set of tools), to be more affordable to more people, and in particular people who maybe aren't making money on their photography, and can't shell out $700 for a full program (not to mention the $300 upgrades), but can factor $10 into their budget per month. Over 3 years, you pay around $360, or roughly $600 over 5 years (continued...)

You would have paid at least $700 for one version, and let's say you keep that perpetual version for 5 years. You've still paid more than the subscription over the 5 years. And at year 5, you have a 5 year old, "out dated" version. At $600 and 5 years, you have the latest version, and have paid $100 less than you would have for a perpetual version, over that same time frame. I'm not telling people to switch from their current editors if they aren't using Adobe, nor am I saying Adobe is "better" than the others or worse. People just need to do the math as it seems many people have a problem with the subscription, and some feel it's cheaper to get a perpetual license. For a small percentage of people, that may make sense, but for many, it really doesn't.

Basically, If you don't like the feature, or Adobe products, don't use it. If you want to move away from Adobe because you don't like their subscription model, nobody is stopping you.

"For me however I consider what I do important enough to not throw myself at the mercy of the maker of the tools I use. " Yea bit like cars/transport but then again you must walk everywhere so it isn't a problem for you ... Do you make your own shoes? You know kill the beast skin it etc....

They want $50 a month for what I use, which I've already paid for multiple times as you've stated. How much money am I supposed to give that company? And if you stop paying, they bug you like it's a utility. When does it stop? How come people accept this? Meanwhile, they make more money than ever before by far and no one seems to notice.

It shouldn't be that I'm required to stay updated. I should be able to choose. But they force your hand. They know most of us use raw and they used to only update that for so long, and now not at all unless you're connected to the Intravenous, bleed you dry all your life, model. It's so terrible.

I guess there's always the hands-tied-behind-your-back Gimp for free. But again, I use more than one program and they want to charge me $600 every year for the rest of my life to use Software. Let's say that I started CC as a 25 year old and stopped when I was 75. 50 years at $600 is $30,000.

Who exactly is MAKING you use Adobe products?? Who exactly is making me use Microsoft WINDOWS? Nobody. It was my choice, and if I had to swtich to Mac, I wouldn't blame MIcrosoft or Apple. It wasn't their fault. If i had to switch to CaptureOne or DXO, is it Adobe's fault? Not entirely, and mostly the user's fault to be honest. NOBODY makes you use the software you use. It usually starts as a choice. There are alternatives out there if you don't like to pay $50 per month. The switching costs are high, but it's not impossible.

Please name for me one product that is "perfect" for every photographer... I don't think such a program exists. To some, CaptureONe is the perfect solution... to others, Adobe is the way to go. For some, Mac is the best platform to use because the understand it. For others, Windows makes more sense.

Are you using the full Adobe suite of products that is offered for the $50 per month, and are you simply doing this as a hobby?

It sounds as if you might be using Adobe CC for money-making ventures, although maybe not, I'm not sure as it hasn't been clarified. But if you are making money using the software, then it's like a cost of doing business. Just like buying gas to visiting clients or go to a paid-photo shoot is also a cost of doing business. If you're not, then ask yourself if you're really using all the products in the bundle. I was for a time, but then only used PS and LR, so I downgraded when my subscription (which was annual) ended.

We let this happen! There are a lot of companies doing just fine without charging $30,000 over the lifetime of their clients. It's not a car, and it shouldn't be priced like one.

It's a wonderful set of tools. But there's no reason for a $1000 phone or a $600 per year software suite. Why does a company ever have to get to or near a trillion dollars? That's charging too much! That's all that means.

I'd be happy to go the CC route, and I still might do so begrudgingly; but I sure won't defend something just because I'm enslaved to it by its nature of being the standard and something that I'm quite used to wielding.

I mean unless you're just arguing for argument's sake. Otherwise, I'm sick of all this greed and nickel and diming us; removing features or withholding them to make us want to pay more to have it all. Just a little more gets you HBO too. just a little more is unlimited data. Just a little more gets you a V6. Just a little more...

I'm busy reinstalling the whole Creative Suite on my work computer, because Bridge cannot run unless it locks up my whole computer within minutes on a bad day, hours on a good one. Bridge, in this networked age, simply cannot behave itself on a Windows Server network if its running on a Mac. The Mac has no problems at all with the network (High Sierra). But run Bridge? This morning, Bridge would not even run after startup when I got to work. First thing it did was lock up three programs instantly, and not even bother to launch.

Press the option key while starting? Sure, tried that. It locks up and won't even let you click OK.

Adobe needs to stop making half-baked options like this, and start making their software leaner and faster and more functional overall. As in, it just works.

I found I had to re-install photoshop (and do a serious deep clean of files) after the recent OS patches for the critical CPU vulnerabilities. It's the first time I ever had to do something like this on a mac. I believe it had to do with plug-ins after the patches.

tried the select subject, its still crap and leaves you with a ton of work to do

not at all revolutionary, certainly wont replace most peoples current work flow, a nice idea. but just doesnt work yet , atleast not on busy backgrounds (even in adobes own example it completely chops the hand off one of the subjects)

Not a user of PS, but when I read "Of course, more difficult scenarios where the subject isn't so obviously delineated against the background will give Select Subject more trouble", I took that to mean "people with hair that isn't slicked flat on their head". Good to hear it doesn't seem to have trouble with regular humans with dry hair.

Fortunately, over roughly 50 years of practise, I've cracked being able to read & write sentences like the ones you see in the brief exchange above in considerably less than an hour, so that "time" you refer to, String, was less significant than you might expect. Remarkable, I know, but true.

* (Edit) I guess you intended your remark for Jan. Let's assume, though, that it didn't take so long for him to read this article that's mostly pictures, either.

@ BaldCol: I use Adobe software on a daily basis... and always moan about Adobe. The products are OK, it's just that after all these years we shouldn't be forced to pay so much, forever, for a load of clunky, ancient, code wrapped up in a modern interface, which has paid for its development costs many times over. It's Adobe's obscene greed and utter contempt for its customers that sickens people, not the products.

""Adobe's obscene greed and utter contempt for its customers that sickens people"" Lol, yeah sure whatever!You use it on a daily basis but I bet you still charge for your editing time? How about your shooting time? How dare you, you know those product inside out! You must be obscenely greedy and have nothing but contempt for your customers...

@Reactive, I do not care how old the code is as long as it works, which as far as I can tell it does. What do you gain by re-wrtting code that already works? Just an opportunity to introduce new bugs and annoyances.

Do you see the irony in complaining about lack of innovation by Adobe in an article about Adobes latest innovation?

The AI stuff is starting to impress. I don't make much use of lightroom CC except on a laptop but it's ability to search my images is very impressive. If they roll that out to Classic, Bridge or anything else in teh suite it would be a big help.

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